HHS Seeks Ways To Reduce Health Care-Associated Infections

Greg Lavine

BETHESDA, MD 24 September 2008—Senior representatives from agencies across the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are meeting to develop an action plan to combat health care-associated infections.

HHS is responding to an April report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that called for a more organized effort to deal with these infections, said Don Wright, principal deputy assistant secretary for health in HHS.

Wright provided a progress report to a meeting of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology in Arlington, Virginia, on Tuesday.

"I have to say there is a renewed commitment to this issue," Wright said. "It has been a long-standing priority within the Department of Health and Human Services. We recognize it is a significant public health problem."

HHS officials plan to finish a draft action plan before the Bush administration leaves office. The report could serve as a blueprint for the next administration for dealing with the issue, Wright said.

The senior-level steering committee has identified the following priorities: catheter-induced urinary tract infection; surgical site infection; bloodstream infection; ventilator-associated pneumonia; methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections; and Clostridium difficile infections.

The GAO report criticized HHS for not prioritizing its recommended practices for health care facilities. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists nearly 1200 recommended practices, with 500 labeled as strongly recommended.

GAO officials "encouraged us as a department to see if we could prioritize those recommendations to be more [user-friendly] to the hospital community to help them know which one of those are actually the most important," Wright said.

Several smaller groups will be working on assignments ranging from creating consolidated lists of recommended practices for each targeted infection to finding the best practices now being used in the health care industry, he said.

"We want to highlight those [best] practices, share with other hospitals what they’ve done, and hope that plagiarism will take over this country," he said.

Committee members will meet later this week to help determine short- and long-term goals for the draft action plan.